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John L. Flynn 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY—BEYOND THE INFINITE Retrospective by Dr. John L. Flynn Introduction The year 2001 marked the beginning of a new millennium and the end of rumors about a doomsday computer bug. The year 2001 witnessed the inauguration of a United States President following questionable election returns from the state of Florida and the horrifying destruction of the twin World Trade Towers in New York City by Muslim terrorists. The year 2001 saw the introduction of the Segway, the mapping of the human genome, the decline of the world’s economic markets, the rise of thinking machines far more complex and sophisticated than the human mind, and the ongoing construction of the International Space Station while in orbit around the earth. The year 2001, as imagined by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in 1968, turns out to have been quite different from our reality and now, in fact, looks rather quaint. For all of the predictions about a commercial orbiting space station, talking super-computers, a satellite network, and a fleet of space shuttles that have come true, the lunar colonies (of both Russia and the United States), the mission to Jupiter (and beyond), suspended animation, and first contact with an alien species remain as unfulfilled dreams. The biggest surprise was that Kubrick and Clarke failed to predict the personal computer or the Internet. But their film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was more than just a motion picture about what the next century would look like; it was a metaphor that examined the mystery of what makes us human—not in the small, every day lives of characters in a mainstream movie, but in the larger symbols of time and space. While the year 2001 has come and left its indelible mark on history, the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” remains as relevant as the dreams that it has inspired and the possibilities of man and his place in the cosmos. A View from Serendipity “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) was without a doubt the most influential science fiction film of its period, and remains, to this day, one of the greatest motion pictures of all time. In fact, members of the American Film listed the film as number 22 among the 100 Best American Films of all time, and science fiction fans, in a recent poll, have named “2001” as one of the ten best films of the Twentieth Century. Auteured by Stanley Kubrick, who created the equally brilliant “Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” four years earlier, this M-G-M roadshow presentation in Cinerama, filmed in Super Panavision and Metrocolor, was clearly a quantum leap beyond the fantastic visions and cinematic nightmares of Georges Melies, Fritz Lang, James Whale, and George Pal. Regrettably, critical reaction to 2001 was mixed when the film was first released in 1968. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times regarded it as a landmark film, praising its imaginative use of visual images with words like "transcendent" and "fascinating" in order to convey the total experience of the film to his readers. The Saturday Review characterized 2001 as a "milestone film," proclaiming its "unforgettable space journey" as "breathtaking." Time called the film "dazzling, wrenching, eerie . a mind bender." But their appreciation for Kubrick's ten-million dollar masterpiece was among the minority. When “2001: A Space Odyssey” premiered in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 1968, most East Coast film critics found the film slow-moving, dull, and completely bereft of a discernible plot. For some reason, their unfavorable reviews were particularly vitriolic, as if the majority of critics had somehow been personally offended or duped by Kubrick with his artistic rendering of the year 2001. Renata Adler in The New York Times said that “the movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems . that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Judith Crist, writing in New York, suggested that “2001” be “cut in half” in order to “preclude our wondering why exactly Kubrick has brought us to outer space.” Pauline Kael, who had earlier praised “Planet of the Apes” in her New Yorker review, described “2001” as "a monumentally unimaginative movie," while her fellow critics called it "slow-moving," "ponderous" and "incomprehensible." Life Magazine simply labeled it as "brain-boggling." Even science fiction author Lester del Rey stated the film was a “disaster” and likely to “set major science fiction moviemaking back another ten years.” Today, thirty years after its inauspicious debut, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is celebrated not only as a great motion picture but also as a metaphysical, philosophical, and even religious epiphany to man's place in the cosmos. The many questions the film raises about the relationship between man & machine, man & alien, and man & God harkens back to similar questions the early progenitors of the genre, including Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, and Olaf Stapledon, first considered. Science fiction, at its best, has often raised these questions. In the classic models of literary science fiction, including Shelley's Frankenstein, Wells's The War of the Worlds, and Stapledon’s Star Maker, technology gives way to the metaphysical, and reveals the boundless optimism of the soaring human spirit as it takes its place among the stars. Perhaps, the real genius of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” aside from its breathtaking visuals and existential narrative, was its sublime connection to these classic works as it charted mankind's inner odyssey of mind and consciousness, evolving man from ape to star-child to the strains of Johann Strauss's "Blue Danube" waltz. Origins The genesis of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” began with Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," first published in 10 Story Fantasy in 1951 as "Sentinel of Eternity." The simple but somewhat haunting story tells of the discovery of an alien artifact on the moon. In the short, first-person narrative, Wilson, a lunar geologist, glimpses a metallic object high on the ridge of a great promontory overlooking Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crisis. The year is 1996, rather than 2001, and Wilson is part of a large expeditionary force from a lunar base at Mare Serenitatis, exploring and surveying the great mountain ranges in the Southern hemisphere of the Moon. He and his assistant Louis Garnett make an unauthorized climb up the 12,000-foot peak and discover an alien object--twelve-feet tall, shaped roughly like a pyramid, and made out of a glittering, crystalline substance. Wilson doesn't know whether it’s a building, a shrine, a temple, or a device, but he quickly discovers that it is generating a force-field. Twenty years later, even after Earth's scientists have cracked its invisible shield and reached inside, the alien object still remains a complete mystery. Based upon the thickness of the meteoric dust around its lunar base, Wilson concludes that it was set on the moon before life had emerged from the seas on Earth. Its builders must have scattered millions of them throughout the galaxy as beacons to signal that one, glorious day when a race had struggled up from savagery to take its first steps to the stars. The lunar geologist compares the "sentinel" to a fire-alarm, and suggests that humans need only wait for those who built it to arrive. Wilson closes his narrative, saying, "I do not think we will have to wait for long." "The Sentinel" represents Clarke's first exploration of the metaphysical, even mystical, universe that may exist beyond technology and hard-core science. From 1946, with the publication of his first short story "Loophole" in Astounding Science Fiction, to 1951, when his first novel Prelude to Space was published, Arthur Clarke had always written fiction in which human problems were solved rather mechanically by some scientific discovery. The once and future chairman of the British Interplanetary Society had even proposed in scientific journals the deployment and use of satellites for communication years before the launch of Sputnik. He was considered by many of his contemporaries, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, to be a leading proponent of hard SF. With "The Sentinel," however, Clarke moved beyond the physical world where the laws of science ruled like some great monolithic entity to a mystifying realm where science was little more than superstition in light of some vast alien intelligence. Not only were we not alone (in the universe) but mankind actually needed the transcendence of other beings to give his life meaning and redemption. Science fiction is realized as a religion. His image of mankind as orphaned children crying out for the ancient inscrutable wisdom of alien races would dominate his writing for the next forty years, continuing with Childhood's End and reaching apotheosis with 2001: A Space Odyssey and its three sequels. The sweeping vision of Childhood's End (1953) extended Clarke's thesis onto a much broader canvas. In a twist on H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds, Earth is "invaded" and ruled by a thoroughly beneficent race known as the Overlords. Within days of mankind sending its first spaceships to the moon, huge alien mothercrafts appear over every major city on Earth as well as over American and Soviet launch sites. Karellen, the alien supervisor of Earth, orders an immediate cessation to war and the formation of a single world government. At first, the appearance of the Overlords has a profound psychological, religious, and cultural impact on mankind. Later, once Rikki Stormgren, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, has conferred with Karellen, life on Earth returns to normal.
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